Heron

            The heron was at the point every morning, standing ankle deep in the calm water.

            “Look at that bird,” she said. “She’s been there an hour. Hasn’t moved.”

            “He’s fishing,” he said. “He’ll move when he sees something. Probably too fast for you to notice.”

            “I think I’d notice a fishing bird,” she said. “That one is simply standing—meditating, living in the present, breathing in, breathing out. That’s what she’s doing—perfect yoga posture.”

            He wasn’t listening. She knew he wasn’t listening because he didn’t laugh or snort or correct her. She went a little farther out on that fragile limb she constructed every morning, the only time they talked.

            He was standing up, slugging down the second cup of coffee, ready to be out the door, revving up some machine—chain saw, weed whacker, power washer—taming the place, he had said.
            "More re-taming?" she said.

            “What’s that?”

            “You’ve already beat the weeds back, whacked around every tree trunk, paved what you couldn’t seed with grass. What else is there?”

             “I’ve got a lot to do,” he muttered and let the screen door slam behind him. A machine started up a few minutes later. Sounded like the splitter, slicing through the last of their maples.

            The heron heard it too. She hesitated, then lifted her great wings over the calm water, and with no effort at all let the wind carry her far away.

© Kathleen Coskran 2012